


explain everything to the geeks

by misandrywitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Letters, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 09:22:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20289142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: In the month after his father is admitted to the hospital, Alex starts writing letters.





	explain everything to the geeks

**Author's Note:**

> i watched this show in a week & it ate my brain. it is profoundly stupid. i want 75 seasons of it right now.
> 
> this is really just the Alex Manes Therapy Hour. plus some kissing. i make no excuses for what i left out, which largely includes: max, rosa, the whole serial killer thing in its entirety, why exactly i decided to reference romeo & juliet twice. alex's beagle is probably next, chronologically. 
> 
> title is from 'vanderlyle crybaby geeks' by the national (all the very best of us / string ourselves up for love) because while alex manes was at his emo punk table in 2008, i was unfortunately listening to that band & cat power & the decemberists.
> 
> i'm leescoresbies.tumblr.com

In the months after his father is admitted to the hospital, Alex starts writing letters. 

It feels like a cop-out. A true admission that something really is wrong with him and that his inability to look the people he cares about in the eye and just speak what’s happening inside his head is something more than just a personality trait. Collateral damage. You learn to adapt, when you live with it day after day. 

The first one is easiest. 

_ Valenti - _it starts, addressed to the son, and not the father. 

The cabin sits at the end of a long dirt road, so Alex can see anyone driving up to it for miles before they arrive, kicking up a cloud of red dust in the purple evening. There’s a sense of paranoia - of inevitable expectation, even - that makes him follow the dust trail with his eyes until he can see the vehicle. Someday, he knows it’s going to be an Air Force issue jeep, or a Four Runner property last name Manes. It’s not, though. Nor is it a truck, which he doesn’t expect but can’t help hoping for either. 

Alex watches the dust coalesce into Kyle Valenti’s car from the porch of the cabin.

He’s on the porch because getting all the way into the cabin felt like too much work. Getting from his car to the steps had been a hurdle, the steps themselves a hike. So, he’s sitting on the old armchair he’d dragged out here a few weeks ago so he can watch the road, trying to convince himself that the reward of moving inside - pain killers, something to eat, the waiting pile of Project Shepherd data, another sleepless night - is worth the agony. 

It’s not, so he watches the dust. A moment of respite. Alex can’t recall, exactly, the last time he slept through the night. 

Kyle gets out of his car, sees him on the porch, waves. He’s dressed like he came from work. He looks tired too, and Alex can’t blame him. Alex is seized by worry, then panic that something is wrong - he pushes it down, breathes out through his nose. 

“Taking in the view?” Kyle comes up the steps. He doesn’t ask why Alex’s keys are gripped in his hand, why he’s still dressed like he came from the base and hasn’t gone inside yet. 

“Just wondering if you’re stalking me,” Alex says. He notices that, for some reason, Kyle is carrying a six pack with him. Glass beer bottles glint in the evening light. 

“Yeah, totally. Top of my to-do list.” Kyle smiles - warm, friendly Dr. Barbie smile. “You up to anything?” 

Alex bites back a retort - _ Clearly, I’ve got an extensive to-do list that includes sitting here sobbing on your dad’s porch - _and gives a more logical answer. “I’m trying to work through the data files from Caulfield, but it’s extensive. And I’m tired.” 

“Wanna drink about it?” Kyle proffers the six pack, putting it between the two of them like a chaperone. “Cause I could really drink about it.” 

Alex stares at him. Kyle stares back. 

“You do know,” Alex says slowly, wondering why exactly he has to spell this out, why it isn’t splashed across his face, a new permanent marker of his own ancestry and roll-of-the-dice genetic destiny, “that my father is responsible for the death of the person you loved most in the whole world - and the only man I’ve ever really looked up to - and you’re asking me to get a beer?” 

“Yeah,” Kyle says, and he doesn’t blink.

The thing about Kyle Valenti is that, even when he was going out of his way to make Alex’s life miserable, it was always possible to look him in the eye. He might not have liked what he saw there, but Alex could always do it. 

“You better come in, then,” Alex says, and he gets up slowly, and unlocks the front door. 

Kyle doesn’t ask if he needs a hand, even though Alex can tell he wants to. 

“You can have the keys back, if you want them,” Alex makes himself say it, avoids looking at Kyle by hunting for the bottle opener. He pops caps off of glass bottles and hands one over. It’s a good beer - something from a trendy brewery in Santa Fe. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“To this place.” 

“You think I showed up to evict you?” 

“I’m just offering,” Alex says, and he sits down heavily in the armchair in the living room. Jim Valenti’s armchair. His ratty couch, his coasters, his weathered porch, his land. Alex watched the video footage over and over until the sting wore off - until he could look at it, mechanical, for details. Jim’s face in a rictus of pain, and his father’s own expression stony and inscrutable. Like always. 

He feels himself steel his own jaw, and hates it. 

“For a genius,” Kyle says, and he sits down on the couch opposite, “you’re kind of an idiot.” 

“I don’t think I can sit here and talk about my day, Valenti,” Alex says. 

“I had tuna fish for lunch,” Kyle says, “and some idiot came into the ER with a sex toy stuck up his butt.” 

Alex snorts bitter beer up his nose because his laughter catches him by surprise. 

“I know it’s been a long time,” Kyle says. “You know, since we were really friends. We were inseparable for a while, huh? Something you take for granted when you’re a kid. I guess I thought we should actually talk about it.” 

He’s resting his hands on his knees and he looks awkward - too big for his body. The frown on his face makes him look less like Dr. Barbie. It doesn’t make him look like the kid Alex knew, either. He’s become someone else - someone moral and responsible and funny and complex. Someone Alex likes, in spite of himself. 

“Didn’t think you were that kind of doctor,” Alex says. 

“Hey, I’m laying on the couch. Not you. And if you’re gonna get in a good bout of self-flagellation because of the asshole headtrip who passes for your dad, then I get to properly apologize for what I put you through as a kid first.” 

“Did you just say flagellation?” Alex asks. He picks at the label on the beer can with his thumbnail.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” Kyle continues, undeterred. He says what he thinks - the result, Alex supposes, of living without shame. But maybe, because he’s admitting any of this, that’s not so true. “I did, when you were overseas. When we got the news that you were in the hospital, I just kept thinking about how much he would have worried. Mom worried. I did, too." 

“Your mom called me,” Alex says. “A few times. That I remember, anyway.” He doesn’t remember a lot, from the first few days. Just the pain, and nerve endings firing wrong trying to put more pain into digits that weren’t there anymore. 

“But until Dad died,” Kyle keeps going, unfazed or ignoring Alex’s attempts to move this conversation somewhere else, “I didn’t really want to consider it. What being a bully in high school said about me. People always ask, you know, why I became a doctor. You’re supposed to say _ Oh, to help people, _because that’s what people expect. I don’t really know why I did it. Until recently, I don’t think I know why I wanted to do anything.” 

“You worked your way through med school, just cause?” This is kind of a trainwreck but Alex can’t look away. 

“I didn’t even work that hard at it, man. I mean, I worked. Ingested Adderall, went through the paces. I thought it would make my old man proud, make me look good. I was gonna be a brain surgeon or something.”

“And you’re an ER doctor,” Alex says. Kyle shakes his head. 

“My dad was a guy with morals,” Kyle says firmly. “Not perfect - can’t say that after everything I’ve learned about him. But he tried to do the right thing, I think. Even when he didn’t. When he was dying I thought a lot about doing the right thing, and being on the right side. How those aren’t the same.”

“If you walk far enough the right and turn your head,” Alex says, “then everybody else is on the wrong side. That’s relative. It has to do with where you’re standing. Learned that in the military.” 

He thinks about about his dad, and about the government designing a bomb, about Baghdad and about the iridescent curve of metal wrapped in a towel and locked in the cabin’s hidden room. 

“But doing good’s not,” Kyle says, and he’s looking at Alex intently now. There’s a wrinkle between his brows. “At least, I have to think that. My dad tried to do right. I don’t think it was always good, until the end.”

“Then what,” Alex says, and drains his beer bottle, “does that say about mine?”

“I’m more interested in what it says about you,” Kyle says. “Cause you’re a good guy. And I’m sorry that I was a shithead.” 

Alex’s urge is to deflect. Throw it back in his face somehow, or minimize the damage. He takes a deep breath through his nose. “Thanks,” he says, instead. 

“You want another beer?”

“Yeah.” 

“I think it means,” Kyle says, when he sits down again closer to Alex on the couch, “that we have to do good. That’s what it means for us, what our dads did. Even though my dad had a change of heart, he still hurt a lot of people.” 

“The sins of the father?” Alex says. He means it to come out bitter, but it’s really just a statement. Nothing to refute there. 

“Shakespeare!” Kyle points with his beer bottle. “I read.” 

Alex had been thinking about the Bible, not _ The Merchant of Venice, _but he doesn’t say anything.

“But that’s not what I mean, anyway,” Kyle says. “We can’t fix what’s been done. What they did. But - you and I can make this mean something else.” He gestures in between them with his hand. Doctor’s hands, meant for comfort and for fixing problems instead of breaking things into new shapes. 

Kyle might mean something literal - a Manes and a Valenti - or something less concrete. Two people who hated each other once, finding some common ground. 

“Two houses both alike in dignity,” he says. “That is Shakespeare.” _ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. _

“Must've missed that one,” Kyle frowns at him, less seriously. 

“_Romeo and Juliet? _Doesn’t ring a bell? We definitely read it in high school English.” 

“Whatever you say, nerd.” 

Alex extends the neck of his beer bottle in Kyle’s direction like a bridge. Kyle clinks his against it, the sound an affirmation. They drink, the motion a promise.

After Kyle leaves, Alex folds the letter up and stores it with Jim Valenti’s old fishing rods and photographs in the closet. He doesn’t send it. 

* * *

_ Dear Maria - _Alex writes, which should be easier than it is. 

His friendship with Maria had always been easy. It was the first truly natural relationship he’d ever developed with anyone - a mutual recognition of what it feels like to be the odd one out, long before he sat with her on a stack of crates behind her mom’s bar and told her, repeating himself and unable to meet her eye, that he was gay. 

He barely remembers talking to Michelle Valenti on the phone, after being airlifted from Fallujah to Baghdad to a hospital in Germany. But he remembers Maria’s voice so clearly, through the fog of white coats and morphine drips. She was always like that - the brightest thing in the room. 

“My mother had a dream,” she’d said, in lieu of hello, “that something had happened to you.” 

“She should take that act on the road,” Alex said, through numb lips. 

Maria had laughed first before she’d cried. Maybe that was the difference. 

So he writes her a letter. 

Before he can send it, she calls him. After everything he’s seen and learned in the past few months, it’s easier all the time to believe that she might really have an intuition beyond the normal. 

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she says, into the phone, “but I could really use your company.” So Alex gets in the car. 

Getting in the car is more of a process than expected, and there are moments where he wishes the cabin wasn’t so far outside of town. Most of the time, he’s grateful for it. Tonight thought, he fights with handbrakes and the seatbelt. He looks himself in the eye in the rearview mirror and repeats a mantra - out loud because there’s nobody else around. 

“You’re in New Mexico,” he says, “you’re safe, there will be nothing in the road, and you will get to your destination without anybody blowing a hole in the side of your car.” 

Maria’s face falls somewhere between relief and guilt when he shows up, but she told him she doesn’t want to talk about it so Alex doesn’t say anything. They end up, like the used to as teenagers, sprawled across her bed with a joint burning idly in between them. It feels like a truce, because they haven’t exactly been talking - an unspoken avoidance that comes from knowing someone well enough to avoid the hurt rather than dig in. Sometimes it’s necessary in close quarters with someone, and Alex is good at burying the hurt with something else. 

So they don’t talk about it. Alex asks about Mimi, and he’s stoned enough to laugh when Maria starts recounting her mother’s dead serious recounting of an episode of The X Files as a psychic vision. 

“I couldn’t look her in the eye and say - “ Maria chokes out, laughing too hard to continue.

“Did you ask her if she’s ever seen Jose Chung’s From Outer Space?” 

“Who hasn’t?” Maria throws her head back. “It’s awful but truly, it’s funny too. I have to be able to laugh at something right now, I guess.” 

Alex is glad that she can. He hasn’t felt much like laughing, lately. “I should go see her,” he says, feeling guilty. Stoned guilt feels less like a hammer and more like a shroud. “I’ve been meaning to but - “

“Work?” Maria raises an eyebrow. “You mean on the base, or off of it?” 

“Yes,” Alex says vaguely. 

“Everyone’s keeping secrets,” Maria sighs. She twists a ring around her pinkie finger. “You, Liz, Guerin. Everyone.” 

Her lipstick rubbed off onto the new joint she’s rolled. It makes her look less pulled together, and younger. It reminds Alex, viscerally, of looking at his own face in the mirror without the scrubbed-on eyeliner and the hair dye, the day he’d signed his enlistment papers. 

He breathes out through his nose, flexes his hand on his knee. _ You’re in New Mexico, you’re with Maria, there’s nobody else here and nothing anyone else expects of you - _

“Thought you were a psychic,” Alex says, and he doesn’t mean it to sound mean but it does anyway. He expects a withering _ fuck you _stare but it doesn’t come. 

“Guerin and I,” Maria interrupts his train of thought- slams a brake on it so his head goes flying through a windshield and right into the traffic he was hoping to avoid, “are done doing the useless dance of the blonde leading the blind. Just for the record.” 

“Thought you didn’t want to talk about it,” Alex says. 

Maria puts the heel of her hand against her eye. When she looks up at him again, she smears mascara across her face. Alex licks his thumb and wipes it off automatically. 

“I don’t,” she says, “but I think I’d rather do that than be treated to the Airman Diplomat routine all evening.” Maria frowns, her mouth turning down. Alex shouldn’t be the one making her frown - that’s the business of other people, other boys and shitty bar patrons and the universe at large. 

The universe at large conspires to set him up to hurt people, Alex thinks. Most of the time it’s not intentional, not at close quarters. It just comes with the last name. 

“You haven’t hurt me,” Maria says. “I’m the one you should be mad at, and I can’t figure out why you’re not.” 

He may have said that out loud. 

“I’m not mad,” Alex says, definitely out loud and not in his head. “I’m not. I don’t think I have the time to be mad at you, even if I could stomach it. I mean - it’s kind of why I figured you called.”

“You’re saying you don’t have a speech that you practiced in the car on the way over here waiting for me?” She digs her foot into his thigh. 

“I don’t do - it wasn’t landing right. I needed more time to polish it. And that’s rude,” Alex says. “I didn’t realize you knew I did that.” Just when it’s something important, or when he needs to work through outcome scenarios. Lately, that’s been a lot of the time. 

“Babe,” Maria says. “I’m psychic, remember?” 

And I made out with an alien in the UFO Emporium, Alex thinks. He really hopes he hasn’t said that one out loud. 

Maria is staring at him through her smeared mascara, so he doesn’t think he did. He didn’t get it all off with his thumb but doesn’t want to risk poking her in the eye. 

“I’m not mad,” Alex repeats, just in case. “I’m just - tired.” 

“It was nice, I guess,” Maria says, “to be looked at. Without someone expecting something from you that you can’t give. That’s not a solution to anything though, is it? I thought it felt nice to be selfish, for once. But not nice enough to justify the rest of it.”

Alex can’t think of a time where that’s been true for him. Except right now, maybe, because Maria is looking at him and he knows she won’t judge for how he responds. 

“That depends,” Alex says, “on exactly what shit's coming out of his mouth today."

That makes her laugh, which is what he wanted. 

“We talked about you,” Maria says. “Maybe the one thing we had kind of an honest conversation about.” 

“Don’t think you should be telling me that,” he says. “It’s not my business.”

“If it’s about you, it’s your business,” Maria’s chin has dropped onto his shoulder. “I work in a bar. That’s my rule. But I’m not going to tell you.” 

“Good. Cause I don't want to know.” 

“I know. I’m psychic,” Maria rolls her tongue around in her mouth. “Remember?” 

“What am I thinking right now?” 

Maria screws up her eyes and pretends to think. “That if,” she says slowly, “you got up right now and hopped down the street like a pogo stick, you could get us milkshakes from the Crashdown.” 

“I am not Go Go Gadget.” 

“Yeah. You're cuter.”

“I missed you,” Alex says, and he finds he’s got his arm around her. It’s what he’d said to her, semi-lucidly, across several thousand miles from a German hospital bed. That had made her cry. 

“Boys ain’t shit,” Maria says. “You can yell at me next time I act like such a fool, alright? You’ve got my permission.” 

“I wouldn’t,” Alex says, and means it. Maria hugs him back to let him know she knows. 

"You're a good man, Alex Manes," she says, and Alex wants to believe her so much that he closes his eyes. 

He burns the letter addressed to her, the next evening. It feels symbolic in a way she’d appreciate it - and anyway, she’s psychic. She already knows what he was going to say. 

* * *

_ Dad - _Alex writes, but he doesn’t get very far before he snaps the pencil he’s holding in half. 

It catches him by surprise, and a chunk of wood and graphite goes pinging across the cabin to roll under the couch. He doesn’t go after it. He just stares at the letter and the pencil, and thinks about clean breaks and ragged edges. Even when Alex wants things to be clear-cut, he gets left with the kind of wounds that always heal wrong. The distinct, surgical scar that nobody can interpret as anything other than trauma. 

He forces his jaw to relax, and he checks the road outside the cabin for dust, and he walks around the back of the building to the makeshift firing range he’s constructed and shoots until his aim is straight and five empty beer cans in a row pop off the fence and into the creosote. 

Michael Guerin once told Alex how he knows Alex is always going to walk away. What he doesn’t understand is that sometimes it’s the only choice with an outcome Alex can control. 

Given enough time and details and planning - and a lever big enough to move the earth - Alex can infiltrate any scenario and find the higher ground. He’s good at that. He’d been surprised to find that out, because he’d gotten so used to playing for a baseline of just getting by. 

Alex isn’t sure if he should thank his father for that one, or hate him. Depends on the day. 

  
  


“Alex!” Liz waves at him from a booth in the corner of the Crashdown. “It’s a long drive from the cabin, huh? Your food’s been ready for ten minutes.” 

Alex has always liked Liz’s family restaurant for the Mexican food more than the music or the kitsch. It had been a bubble of safety - a place to occupy counter space with elbows or a guitar case without judgment. Until Liz had started dating Kyle, and Michael Guerin had started stealing Alex’s guitar and asking him if he wanted to jam sometime, anyway. 

Like the Devil - Alex notices that Michael is in the corner with both his arms in the wires of the cafe’s jukebox. He hits his head when Liz calls Alex’s name, and then swears, and then swears some more when he drops something. 

“It’s not exactly down the street,” Alex says, and slides into the booth. “Thanks for saving it for me.” 

He’d worked two ten-hour days, slept a couple of fitful hours, given up and pored over the old data storage drives and paper files he’d stashed in the cabin’s secret bottom room. It feels like he’s running in circles around it, or treading water. He’s sorted, and surveyed, and archived. Spent three chilly afternoons with a metal detector combing unoccupied Army land for hidden bunkers or doors, expecting company the entire time. He’s dug through old blueprints, and service records, and civilian contracts. Everything is dated when it’s not illicit, or neatly taped off and hidden by red tape and CLASSIFIED. He doesn’t buy it. It’s beginning to wear on him.

Liz doesn’t look much better. The shadows under her eyes are so dark they’re almost blue.

“I’m sure you could find somewhere to rent in town,” Liz says, and she steals one of his fries. Alex lets her. “If you wanted to.” 

“I don’t,” Alex says. The distance stops him from feeling like he’s just running over old ground. Tearing up old wounds. Most of the time, anyway. 

Liz doesn’t push it. She just nods. “Hey,” she says, and her hands land on his arm. “Alex. Kyle told me your father is in the hospital.” 

Alex curses Kyle Valenti and his big fat mouth. It’s not a secret, exactly, because Jesse Manes isn’t exactly an unknown face in this town. But he’d wanted to spare anyone else the strife of having to think about next steps. 

“Yeah,” Alex says shortly. “He hasn’t woken up yet. I understand it’s some kind of head injury.” 

“I thought he was in Africa.” Liz is looking at him, or through him, and Alex looks back at her levelly. He knows his jaw tightens into professionalism but he can’t help it. 

“I did too,” Alex says which isn’t, strictly speaking, a lie. “Someone found him by the side of the road, in his truck. I suppose he was coming back from the base and ran himself off the highway. Dad always did have a bad case of road rage.” 

He stands, thanks Liz for his dinner, heads towards the exit, and hates the way he can feel the steel in his spine. 

Alex makes it out the door before Michael stops him. He might have expected that at a different time, but Alex is trying not to expect anything from Michael. Even eye contact. 

“Is what she said true?” Michael doesn’t grab Alex’s arm but he motions towards the side of the building with his elbow, and Alex follows. “Your old man’s on a trip to the ICU?”

Alex tells himself to unwind, forces a breath through his mouth. One mention of his father and he’s braced for impact. He doesn’t speak until he breathes out a second time, feeling the tension from his back move into his hip. He puts more weight into his crutch. 

“Yes,” he says. “It is.” 

“Fucking hell.” Michael pushes his hair out of his face with his good hand. “Kind of a convenient car crash.” 

It should be alarming how easy it is to fall back into conspiracy with Michael Guerin. Then again, maybe not. Michael’s the only person who has Alex’s secrets - most of them. And Alex remembers being told _ I’ve never shown this to anyone else. _He can’t bring himself to care. They’ve been cordial, even friendly, from a careful and neutral distance. Michael hasn’t acknowledged the thread of their incomplete conversation, now left cold. 

“Sure,” Alex says, dropping his voice. “If by car crash you mean Kyle Valenti with a needle full of barbiturates. That’s a winning hand of Clue.” 

Michael stares at him. “Huh,” he says, finally. “Didn’t think Valenti had the balls, frankly.”

“Don’t see why not,” Alex says, “after everything that’s happened.” Alex had thought about proposing marriage when Kyle had called, yelling down the phone about _ Your fucking father _ and _ Come right now _ and _ He’s still breathing. _

“Where’d he get the barbiturates?” 

“I believe he was worried that the Master Sergeant might come calling,” Alex says, carefully. “Not without cause, clearly. As for where they came from - he borrowed them from the hospital. I, uh,” he hadn’t meant to bring this part up, “haven’t been sleeping, much. It was a convenient excuse. Michael, listen to me.” 

Alex catches Michael’s arm, just below his rolled-up sleeve. Michael stares at his fingers rather than look Alex’s way, which helps. It shouldn’t be this hard to tell someone what he’s thinking but Michael always has a way of doing what Alex least expects. Of breaking the pattern in the code. 

“I’m all ears,” Michael says. He looks sketchy. More so than usual. 

“Don’t,” Alex says, low and quiet. “Don’t do anything stupid, or reckless. Don’t. It’s a big enough shit show. The hospital called the base, my brothers -“ he clears his throat. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. Kyle and I will handle it.” 

“How’d you know what I was thinking?” Michael asks, and his eyes do move to Alex’s face. 

“Because I’ve thought the same thing,” Alex says simply, and he waits for the other shoe to drop.

It doesn’t. Michael nods. “How do you plan to handle it, exactly?” He asks. 

“I'm going to do the right thing. I’m going to take Project Shepherd apart from the inside out,” Alex says, and he makes himself look Michael right in the face long enough for it to hurt. 

“I believe you,” Michael says, after a moment. And then he’s moving, pushing away from the wall and back towards the restaurant. He claps Alex on the shoulder as he goes and Alex is so grateful for the contact that it takes him a moment to register what the matter is. 

Michael’s left hand brushes Alex’s collar. Five fleeting points of contact. Alex wants to lean into them. He wants to run in the other direction. Michael’s left hand - the damage printed so clearly into Alex’s memory as three gnarled knuckles and his twisted little finger - is whole, and unscarred. 

He makes it as far as the alley behind the cafe before he throws up. 

Even in the hospital bed in Roswell General, Master Sergeant Manes looks like he’s plotting revenge. 

Alex is accustomed to his father’s careful, detached neutrality - the way he looks at people like he’s picking them apart. Alex had tried to sit through a few sessions designed for Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse because he’d felt it was the mental equivalent of eating his brussel sprouts. But the talk had always trended towards the fear of unpredictability and of anger. Alex’s father never does anything without calculating the outcome. He never left anything to chance, or acting without thinking it through. All you could do was play the waiting game. That made it worse. 

But he does look angry, in his sleep. 

Alex has come by the hospital before. He hadn’t wanted to, after he and Kyle had dragged his father’s heavy, unconscious body out of the bunker and into his car. It felt too much like a reversal - shoving Alex into his father’s shoes to stare down at a hospital bed. 

They hadn’t spoken, much. Doctors had told Jesse Manes how proud he must be, how worried. Alex had thought, hazy and exhausted, that his father was proud of the Purple Heart because it was the only one the family was missing. 

Nothing about it feels like a victory. And Alex has a hard time stomaching hospital beds. 

But he drives to the hospital anyway, because it saves face. Alex stands in the room by himself and watches for a while, until he can look at the details mechanically. It isn’t a tenable situation. Kyle is waiting for him to come up with a plan - to outmaneuver the master of thinking ten steps ahead so they come out of this on top. He’s not sure that’s possible. It's a matter of time before someone looks at this more seriously. Every day that passes gets them closer to the moment that one of Alex’s brothers, or other military personnel embedded deep inside that CLASSIFIED red tape - and those might be one and the same - show up here. 

Alex is playing a waiting game, and he’s also running the clock and waiting for the hammer to drop. 

Something of his thoughts must be coming through on his face, because the nurse checking his father’s vitals looks at him sympathetically, mistaking his expression for sadness. 

“How are you holding up, honey?” The nurse asks. 

“This is fucked seven ways to Sunday,” Alex says, and she pats him sympathetically on the arm. 

  
  


Alex doesn’t finish the letter. His father, he decides, isn’t worth the dignity. And Alex has other plans for demonstrating exactly how much he respects his father’s legacy, anyway. 

* * *

_ Dear Michael, _Alex writes, and several hours pass until he’s finished it. 

Alex signs it -- _ Yours -- _and he puts it in an envelope and seals it. The letter and the carefully wrapped package containing a curving iridescent piece of metal go into the passenger seat of his car. 

He listens to late 90’s Green Day on the drive, because sometimes you have to tell the establishment to suck it. Even when you've become the establishment. Can you still be considered the establishment when you're in the middle of breaking at least a dozen security laws? Alex contemplates that instead of thinking about Michael. But it means thinking about Project Shepherd, and what's at stake - which brings him back to Michael. And anyway, the question would make Michael laugh, and call him "private" in that tone of voice that meant he was thinking more about what's underneath the uniform. 

Alex drives the last secret he's been keeping from Michael Guerin into the junkyard, and holds his breath. 

It's the right thing to do. The good one. But that doesn't mean it isn't going to hurt. 

  
  


Discovering the secret had been about finding an angle. Faced with the coalescing facts that his father was involved in something - Alex had felt the thrill of a win. The specifics were ridiculous. Alien technology, spaceship crash survivors, some kind of hidden war happening behind Roswell’s closed doors for decades. But it could have been anything, really. All that mattered was his father was involved, and he probably shouldn’t be. 

It wasn’t until Alex pulled a stack of papers with Michael Guerin’s face and name that he’d thought beyond the interpersonal. He’d kept the shock inside for the most part. Even managed to hand his father back his gun, knowing he had to seem composed and remote, professional. A soldier collecting ammunition for a fight he knew he had to win. His father wanted an outburst and Alex allowed himself one, before bottling it up again. 

Inside though, he was brittle and wired. Facts careened out of his control and into new shapes like someone taking a hammer to them. 

He’d repeated what he wanted to say to himself in the hazy mirror in the bathroom of the cabin, and then again in the car, and once in his head as he walked towards Michael’s trailer. And then Michael, as usual, had blown it up and send Alex spinning and grasping at straws. 

He’d come looking for a truth. A clean break, or a reconciliation. And Michael was building a spaceship. 

The junkyard is quiet. Alex knocks a few times on the trailer door and doesn’t get a response. He almost backs out then, even as he knows he’s talking himself out of it. It’s the safer thing to do, anyway. Alex has no idea what Michael will do. If he’ll ever speak to him again. 

Instead, he fusses with the lock on the trailer until it lets go, and he leaves the package and the letter on Michael’s desk inside. Then he drives very slowly and carefully back towards the cabin, staying just over the speed limit

Alex isn’t an optimist. He doesn’t look in the rearview mirror. He locks the door, and he gets to work. 

That’s why - hours later as the evening settles over the hills - he reaches for his gun when he hears a car door slam outside the cabin. He climbs slowly up out of the cabin basement, puts his back to the fireplace to cover the trapdoor up, then dares to look out the window. 

Michael’s truck is parked at the end of the dirt road. It’s empty. Michael himself is storming furiously towards the cabin, creating his own cloud of dust. All in black with his hat on, he looks like gunslinger in a Western coming to get what’s his. 

Alex breathes out through his nose. He leaves the gun on the table and steps on to the porch .

Michael skids to a halt feet from the cabin. His face is wild and blotchy and he’s brandishing - Alex’s stomach drops - the letter. Opened, clearly read. 

“What,” Michael gasps, “the fuck is this?” 

“A letter,” Alex says. “You know, mailmen deliver them.” 

“Alex!” Michael waves the paper around over his head. “Why the fuck - what the fuck - where’d you get it?”

Alex bites back another sarcastic line. They want to spill out because he has no idea how this is going to go. Michael is - not angry, exactly, but chaotic and wild-eyed. “It is a piece of the ship, right? I explained - in the letter. Did you read it?” 

“Of course I fucking read it!” Michael shouts. Alex can’t for the life of him figure out why he’s here. “You had it for months?” 

“Yes,” Alex says. He takes a few steps down off the porch because standing on higher ground feels like a defense mechanism. Michael doesn’t look at him. He paces, feet away. “I didn’t know what it was, right away. Of course, then I did.” 

“And you left it for me - “ Michael’s throat works but no more words come out. “Why?”

“It belongs to you,” he says. “I should have returned it sooner.” 

Michael stops pacing, hands gripping his own elbows. Alex has been watching for a while, from their careful and neutral distance. Michael needed something Alex didn’t have, that much had been clear. And Alex didn’t know how to get closer to Michael’s horrible grief without wanting to try. So he’d written in space, and let it lie. 

But Michael’s here, staring at him. His eyes are almost gold in the evening light. And Alex can’t walk away from this. 

“But why?” 

“That’s why I wrote the - “

“Fuck the letter - I want to hear you say it!” 

“Because,” Alex says, and he looks at the air six inches to the left of Michael’s face, “it’s important to you. Because it’s what you have left of where you came from. Because - “ his voice sticks. He works around it. “Because once, I really needed a way out and I didn’t really have one. So I did the only thing that I could, which wasn’t what I wanted. And I don’t want you to ever be in that position.” 

“You want me to have a way out,” Michael repeats. 

“Because I can’t promise that you won’t need it,” Alex says. _ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean _he thinks, preposterously, and can’t remember what happens next. 

“You wrote that - “ Michael swallows. “You hoped I’d come say goodbye. I didn’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Just cause I’ve got one more piece of a console doesn’t mean I’m leaving here tomorrow.”

“Is that why you’re here?” Alex says, and he’s not certain Michael can even hear him because his voice wavers.

“I’m here because - “ and Alex does look him full in the face, and Michael looks back, “maybe I’m looking for a reason to think that literally reconstructing an ancient rocket-ship and blasting into stratosphere isn’t my last resort.” 

He always does this. Says the last thing Alex expects to hear, the one thing to which no response will ever measure up. 

“And I can’t be the reason why you want to finish it at all,” Alex says. “I can’t.” Hurting people - hurting Michael - is a byproduct of the last name. 

“You,” Michael is shaking his head. “You? You are - “ he’s clutching the letter in one hand like he’s afraid it’s not real, “so fucking stupid.”

“What?” And Alex understands, suddenly. It hits him so fast it knocks the wind out of him. He drops his crutch. Sprinting is, strictly speaking, on the list of activities that’s guaranteed to lay him up the next day on a scale from “hard to get up” to “codeine city.” Alex, not much of a runner to begin with, hasn’t had reason to lament it until this moment. 

He sprints anyway. 

Michael doesn’t run to meet him but he catches him by both elbows when Alex skids to a halt in the gravel. The letter crumples against Alex’s chest. He takes it, folds it, puts it back in Michael’s shirt pocket and for a moment they just stare at each other. 

“That looks like it hurt,” Michael’s eyes flicker towards Alex’s right leg. His fingers dig into Alex’s elbows and Alex flattens his palms against the worn material of Michael’s shirt. He leans in. Michael holds his weight. 

“It might, later,” Alex says. “Don’t worry about it.” 

“I didn’t mean fuck the letter,” Michael says. “It was a nice letter, actually. Never had anyone write me a love letter before.” 

Alex had written it to be an explanation, and a little bit of an apology. But when the reason you’re giving is that you’re in love with someone, it’s only natural that it would transform into a confession too. 

“Sometimes I have a hard time saying what I mean,” Alex says. “I thought it might help to write it down.”

“I’ve got a hard time shutting up,” Michael says, shakily. “I was gonna drive over here and just yell, because I didn’t know what else to do. You knocked me on my ass, but you’re always - “ 

“Will you let me just - “

“And I know that’s part of the problem, when I’m always trying to talk circles around you and everyone else - “

“Michael,” Alex says, and Michael shuts his mouth. “Let me, just - “ 

Alex closes his eyes and relaxes his jaw. When he opens them again Michael is looking at him. Alex doesn’t know how anyone can make him feel like this, by just looking at him. It makes him wonder about what he isn’t hiding on his own face. Afraid for Michael’s safety, he would have run to the other end of the earth so nobody would connect that expression to Michael’s own living, breathing body. 

“It’s not an assumption that you will leave anybody behind,” Alex says, slowly. “That’s not why I brought you that piece. I did because it’s yours - because people shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to them. You deserve to have the chance, if you want it. For answers, or for anything else. I told you - I'm trying to do the right thing.”

“It wasn’t your way of telling me to fuck off into the stratosphere?” Michael’s mouth quirks. Alex can feel his heartbeat through his shirt. It’s irregular - but that could be his own pulse in his fingers. 

“You have to make those decisions for yourself,” Alex says.

“What about you?”

Alex closes his eyes. “I’m good at waiting,” he says. 

“I’m not,” Michael snaps, and Alex opens his eyes again. 

“Good,” he says, and means it. 

Then Michael kisses him.

Alex can’t get close enough, lets himself be pulled by the waist as he holds Michael by the collar and the side of his face. He wants him in the selfish, consuming way that youngest children want to eat up all the attention in the room - so intense it almost makes him self conscious. His leg is unsteady and Michael holds him up. When he puts his hand under Michael’s jaw, his pulse is racing. 

“We should,” Michael pulls away, “probably, uh - I had some other things I wanted to say and - “ he kisses Alex again, “and I wasn’t expecting you to, uh - “ and again, “Alex - “ 

“What were you expecting me to do?” Alex asks. “I wrote you a love letter, it can’t have been that bad.” 

“I don’t know,” Michael exhales. “Whenever I’m ready to write off everybody on this godawful planet, you do something like this, and I - “ he laughs, looks skyward. Alex can’t watch his face make that expression so he closes his eyes. Leans forward to make contact. Michael catches his face with his hands. There are calluses on his thumbs, and on each palm. 

“Maybe we should actually talk about what you came to talk about, when I left you hanging,” Michael says softly. “I don’t think I was ready to hear it. But I think I am now.” 

“It’s okay,” Alex says. “I’ve thought of a better way to say it, anyway. The first time it was a little over-rehearsed.” 

“Alright,” Michael says. “Owe you an explanation about my hand, too.” 

“I can walk you through about 70 years of accumulated government data proving the existence of aliens.”

Michael pulls back, his palm still on Alex’s face.

“You always know just what to say to get me going,” he says, and Alex rolls his eyes. 

“Come on.” He steps away, just far enough to let Michael follow. “Come inside.” 

“Your hunting cabin?” 

“I”m going to redecorate,” Alex says, and limps towards the front door. He’s paying for the sprint already. “Been a bit busy.” 

“What, didn’t even hang up your signed poster of Gerard Way?” 

“Get your ass in the house, Guerin,” Alex says. That’s not what he thinks, though. I love you, he thinks, and I’m sorry it took me such a long time to learn what that means. Some things you can only learn for yourself. 

“If you insist,” Michael says, and he smiles as he passes Alex in the doorway, uncertain and sideways in a way nobody else could ever replicate. 

* * *

Alex wakes up in a war zone.

And then he falls out of bed. 

"Jesus fuck and all hell!" Michael bellows from the other side of the bed. It reaches Alex's ears from a million miles away, as if Michael is calling for him from the other end of a tunnel or the ends of the earth. His own heart is a rhythmic horror in his throat and he can smell blood as Michael's face swims above him like a mirage. There's something buried in the sand. The crack, as Michael's knuckles break. A dislocated rib - an overturned car - the oily black smoke of burning buildings - the silence seconds after an explosion. He throws himself in the other direction and, with only one limb to catch him, topples to the floor. 

He's distantly aware that he's screaming, or had been. His throat feels windswept and raw. There's a hand around his throat. No, no there's not and the distinctive coppery tang is his blood - but no, no it's not.

“Fucking hell!” Michael is fighting with the blankets above him. They rocket unexpectedly across the room, taking out a lamp as they go. “What the fuck? Who’s getting murdered?” 

Alex can’t answer. His head is spinning. His hands don’t feel like his hands. All he can feel is the ache deep in his knee, in his shin and ankle and five toes that simply aren't there anymore, no matter how hard is body is trying to convince him otherwise. 

"Alex - " Michael reaches for him and Alex hears the crack as his knuckles break, hears the bomb go off under their car, hears his own voice give out under the hum of a helicopter. 

"Stay there," Alex gasps. "Just - just stay - " He white-knuckles the edge of the mattress, slides on one hip and can't right himself. Distantly, he's aware Michael is watching him fight gravity but his world has narrowed to his knee pressing into the hardwood floor. That very real pain - not a phantom, not a memory. 

“I need air,” Alex manages. He hauls himself to his feet in a movement that feels Herculean, staggers on one leg for his crutch, then half-tumbles through the dark cabin and onto the porch. The door slams on its hinges behind him, closed and then back open again. Too metaphorical for his liking. 

The night is clear and cold. Alex slides himself right on to the step, ignoring the chair. His crutch clatters into the dirt. He forces himself to breathe the way he’s supposed to be able to breathe. “You’re in New Mexico,” he tells himself, and it comes out like a drill sergeant, “in Jim Valenti’s cabin - your cabin, and you’re safe. You can see anyone coming for miles from here and the only person here is Michael - “ 

It’s not working. Panic feels grim and ridiculous. Alex presses his forehead against his knees. Maybe it’s because that last fact is so unbelievable. He runs over it again under his breath, willing himself to believe it and to make it concrete. 

“Alex?” Michael behind him, and his voice is indescribably gentle. It makes Alex want to scream, or to be held and never let go. 

“Yeah,” he manages, “I’m outside.” 

He sees Michael’s bare feet first. He’d put a pair of Alex’s sweatpants on, Air Force logo and all, and he crosses his ankles over one another as he sits on the step, a few careful feet away. Alex turns to look at him, still making himself breathe - in through the nose and out through the mouth like an ocean. Fuck the ocean. 

Michael’s hair is a mess and his shoulders are bare and strong and he hasn’t composed himself into any mask of careful neutrality, which is usually what happens. 

Michael just watches him, and Alex closes his eyes. 

“Figured you weren’t going too far,” Michael says evenly. “You left your foot behind.” 

Alex lets himself lean in to his voice. With his eyes closed, it could be coming from anywhere. “Yeah,” Alex says. “Asked them to pick it up and bring it along, you know. Perfectly good foot, side of the road. Nobody listens to me.” 

“Even when you’re hyperventilating you manage to be a pain in the ass,” Michael says. “That’s commitment.” 

Somewhere over the ridge behind the cabin, a coyote howls and then grows silent. Alex opens his eyes again. Michael hadn’t turned a light on when he’d come outside, and the night blankets them both, and the cabin, and Michael’s truck sitting on the dirt road. 

“That happen often?” Michael asks. He’s flexing his left hand, newly undamaged. 

“Sometimes,” Alex says, because he needs to respond with something. “I don’t exactly keep a calendar.” The sweat is cooling on the back of his neck under his t-shirt and now he’s just cold, and wrung out. 

“Hey - “ Michael falters. “I can - I’ll give you some space - “

“Don’t,” Alex says quickly. “I don’t want - “ he takes a deep breath. Like an ocean. Fuck the ocean. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I should have warned you, I guess, when I asked you to stay.” 

“I would have anyway,” Michael says. Alex doesn’t know how he can just say it like that, so clearly and casually. “You think it would’ve scared me off?” 

In the dark, his eyes are warm and Alex doesn’t know how to answer that. 

“It’s cold as hell out here,” Michael says softly. “Happy to sit out here as long as you want, but you gotta put something else on. No, look. No sweat. I don’t even have to get up.” He closes his eyes and something moves inside the cabin. The ugly plaid quilt from the couch sails out of the open door like a flag, and drops itself into Alex’s lap. 

“Showoff,” Alex mutters, and pulls it around his shoulders.

Michael smirks. “When you got it, flaunt it,” he says. “Are you gonna bite my head off if I ask how you are?”

“Don’t think so.”

“You okay?”

“I don’t know.” That’s the truth. Michael leans his elbow on his knee and his temple on his palm, digging his fingers into his own hair. He’s looking at Alex. He always is. “It feels like getting - “ Alex trails off.

“Stuck?” 

“Yeah,” Alex says. Michael does understand, of course he does. Alex thinks about him reliving his father, over and over again. A crystallized point in time with a hammer raised and ready to strike. Forever. He’s starting to feel sick. 

“I shouldn’t have said the shit I did,” Michael turns his face towards the road, and Alex stares at him because he’s surprised how close Michael has come to his own thoughts, “all those jabs I kept making. About, you know. Your family’s expectations. I wasn’t thinking about any of this.” 

“You wanted to make me mad,” Alex says.

“If you were pissed in my direction, at least you were looking. Could’ve just asked you how you were doing, I guess.” 

Alex would have responded the same way, probably. Pushed back with a deflection 

“Can I tell you something?” Alex says. That’s the opposite of distance, which makes it the right thing to do.

Michael nods. 

“I thought about you,” Alex says, “when I was in the hospital. Thought about having one of the doctors or the guys on my squad or someone try to figure out how to get ahold of you.”

“Why didn’t you?” Michael’s voice is a whisper. 

“Didn’t even know where to start. I assumed you’d be long gone.” And it would have meant telling the story to somebody, at least part of it. Then, even saying Michael’s name out loud had hurt. Thinking it had hurt. He’d wanted some kind of comfort, staring down at the new shape his body made under hospital blankets, and the closest thing he’d ever really felt to being understood. But that wouldn’t have been true because he’d changed - the kind of thing that can’t be walked back. 

“I wish you had,” Michael says, and Alex turns to stare at him, pulled right out of his own head. Michael worries his bottom lip with his teeth. “I wish I had too. I could’ve. I don’t know if I was ready to stop being angry.” 

He puts his hand - undamaged - on Alex’s thigh. Alex can’t recall being touched there in a way that wasn’t medical or clinical since he lost his leg. Just by Michael. 

“Not at you,” Michael continues. “Not really. It wasn’t fair of me but I wanted to be angry at everything. At the whole damn world. At you and Max and myself and the human race. It made everything less complicated.” 

His voice falters and Alex understands that. It would be easy to be swallowed by his own anger, and he knows Michael’s is fathomless in comparison. By rights. When Alex thinks about it, he feels like he can never stop. 

But he’s just tired. Tired of being angry, and of walking through every step to outmaneuver everyone else. Tired of thinking of every encounter as a win/lose scenario, and of winning as the only outcome. Of the distance, and of his own hurt. Tired of being in pain, too. And of not saying what he means. 

Alex puts his hand on Michael’s. 

“I promise to call you,” he says, “next time I get a leg blown off.” 

“That is not funny.” Michael squeezes his leg and scowls. “Not even a little bit. Jesus. Stop laughing, you fuck.” He sighs. “You could call me when this happens again, though. When you can’t sleep.” 

Alex can’t look at it. He makes himself do it anyway. “Careful what you’re asking for, Guerin,” he says. 

“I think I know what I’m looking at,” Michael says, and he doesn’t look away. “I’m not exactly a stranger to it, anyway.” 

“No.” Alex unsticks his other hand from his knee, moves the blanket from his shoulders to pull it around both of them - an invitation without words. It’s getting colder but Michael is warm against his side. Alex leans the side of his face into Michael’s hair and breathes out. _ You’re in New Mexico, you’re in the cabin, you’re safe and there’s nobody here but Michael - _

Michael moves his hand around Alex’s shoulder, like a question. Alex leans into it. 

“Good thing about being awake at 2 am,” Michael says, his voice a rumble against Alex’s chest. “The sky right now.” 

The sky out here is like the night skies on the other side of the world, far beyond the flood of base camp spotlights. Alex always loved that, always jumping at any excuse for his squad to be assigned overnights even when it felt risky. Canvas tents and the constant arguments about whose bad playlist they’d play in the Humvee and the kind of inside jokes that get so well-worn from time that not only are they not funny to anybody else in a ten mile radius, they don’t even make sense. It was in daylight when things got dangerous. 

And Michael is right. It’s cold and clear - a thousand miles of stars. 

“Half of them are probably just space junk,” Michael says. “But they’re pretty.”

One of them is his, Alex thinks. Somewhere out there. They sit in silence for a while. 

“Can I tell you something, now?” Michael asks. Alex nods. His breathing feels closer to its baseline, finally. “I used to think about this.” 

Alex looks over at him - because he’s pretty sure coping with someone’s midnight panic attack is not exactly what Michael means. 

“You and I,” Michael says. He tightens his fingers around Alex’s shoulder. “And no excuses. I spent a lot of time thinking up excuses to get you alone, you know.” 

“Some of them were pretty transparent,” Alex says. “And I mean - you could have just thrown out an invitation to come see your alien control console. That might’ve worked.” 

“Unfortunately not a euphemism,” Michael says against his temple. "It would've worked?"

"Just because I saw through it," Alex says, "doesn't mean I didn't like it." 

"I did wonder if you saw what I was up to. I don't think I did, half the time. Until I realized how I felt about you. And that was like the universe hitting me in the face with a big sign that said _bisexuality, baby._' 

“I didn’t want anybody to look at me,” Alex says. “It sounds kind of backwards. I stuck out, on purpose. But when people noticed they just saw the scowl, or whatever. Just saw all the stuff on the surface, and nothing that mattered. And then it was the opposite, because it doesn’t pay to stick out either. So I didn’t. Nobody really saw me at all, until you started looking.” 

Michael exhales. Alex breathes in. 

“I never really stopped.” 

Alex kisses him. It feels good to do it first.

Michael's mouth is warm and slow, something close to tentative. Alex chases that feeling. No sense of urgency, nothing exchanged for proximity. 

“Here’s an excuse, if you still need one,” he says, against Michael’s mouth. “Hey, Guerin. I hear you’re building a spaceship. I’d love to help out, sometime. I don’t know anything about astrophysics but I can hold up some blueprints. Or a metal detector. Or your beer.” 

“Hey, Manes,” Michael says, smiling. “If you want some assistance dismantling a shadowy government military operation, I’m all yours. I’m very good at causing trouble, and I can stop bullets with my mind.” 

“I might take you up on that,” Alex says.

For most of his life, Alex has been running the clock and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Always coming to things too late, leaving them too soon, braced for impact. 

But right now, he feels like he might finally be right on time. 

“You wanna go back to bed?” Michael asks. Alex kisses him again, because he can. 

“I’m not in a hurry,” he says, and he lets Michael pull him into the curve of his shoulder. “And you’re right. It is a good sky.” 

**Author's Note:**

> what exactly does alex's letter to michael say? that's his business, not yours. don't be nosy.


End file.
